Oh Holy Molar

Kranky; 2012

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The English trio Felix make music that is unsettlingly intimate, as if singer and songwriter Lucinda Chua were confiding in the listener as a close friend. "Confessional" music typically has an implied barrier between the singer and the audience-- at least some sense that there is mediation that keeps listeners aware that they are voyeurs-- but Chua's music, though clearly addressed to particular people, doesn't seem to draw that line. The result is music that is intense and obviously personal, but slightly disorienting: It's a bit like having a stranger tell you all their secrets while you try to keep track of the concrete details.

Oh Holy Molar, Felix's second album, recalls the starkness and exaggerated intimacy of records by Cat Power and Scout Niblett, but Chua is a far more reserved and poised individual. Whereas those singers can barely hold back their rawest emotion, Chua filters all that through pith and poetry. She delivers her most passive-aggressive lines with a stinging wit, but her funniest lines are self-deprecating, as when she mocks her own musical limitations in the opening track, "The Bells".

Chua is not an exceptionally versatile singer but her phrasing is exceptional, particularly in the way she invests lyrics that might seem like clunkers in print with several shades of emotional subtext when sung aloud. A good example can be found in the late album highlight "Pretty Girls", in which she tells the listener "he said I had beautiful eyes and I said, 'yeah, but I'm dead inside.'" Chua sings "beautiful eyes" as though she is simultaneously wincing and blushing at the suggestion, and her voices is clipped and high on "dead inside," as if she's embarrassed to even utter this teenage goth sentiment. She's also good at singing lines with a blunt force. In the relatively uptempo "Don't Look Back (It's Too Sad)", she echoes the chorus of Björk's "5 Years", singing, "you don't know what love is," but Chua is less exasperated and more resigned in her tone, ending the refrain with a curtly dismissive "anyone who knows what love is would understand."

Felix's music is skeletal in its minimalism, with only the fewest tones and beats required to convey structure and color. Chua is particularly enamored of the sound of her piano, leaving space in many of the songs for her chords and notes to ring out for as long as possible before moving to the next sound or utterance. This is just as true of Neil Turpin's percussion, which is so foregrounded that each beat feels highly considered and deliberate. The approach suits the band's most melodic and outwardly engaging tracks, like "Oh Holy Molar" and "Oh Thee 73", but it wears its welcome on slower, slighter cuts like "Rites", "Little Biscuit", and the two-parter "Blessing". Those songs are not failures, but they reveal the limits of Chua's voice and aesthetic.